“Old habits are strong and jealous. They will not be displaced easily if they get any warning that such plans are afoot; they will fight for their existence with subtlety and persuasiveness.” -Dorothea Brande

The only certain means of success is to render more and better service than is expected of you, no matter what your task may be. This is a habit followed by all successful people since the beginning of time. Therefore I saith the surest way to doom yourself to mediocrity is to perform only the work for which you are paid.-Og Mandino, The God Memorandum

Mark Perry reminds us to remember this:Industrial progress, mechanical improvement, all of the great wonders of the modern era have meant relatively little to the wealthy. The rich in Ancient Greece would have benefited hardly at all from modern plumbing: running servants replaced running water. Television and radio? The Patricians of Rome could enjoy the leading musicians and actors in their home, could have the leading actors as domestic retainers. Ready-to-wear clothing, supermarkets – all these and many other modern developments would have added little to their life. The great achievements of Western Capitalism have redounded primarily to the benefit of the ordinary person. These achievements have made available to the masses conveniences and amenities that were previously the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful.

To know what questions we may reasonably propose is in itself a strong evidence of sagacity and intelligence. For if a question be in itself absurd and unsusceptible of a rational answer, it is attended with the danger - not to mention the shame that falls upon the person who proposes it - of seducing the unguarded listener into making absurd answers, and we are presented with the ridiculous spectacle of one (as the ancients said) "milking the he-goat, and the other holding a sieve."-Immanuel Kant

It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor. There may even be a certain antagonism between love of humanity and love of neighbor; a low capacity for getting along with those near us often goes hand in hand with a high receptivity to the idea of the brotherhood of men.

In 1788 Edward Gibbon completed his great work on The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The following year he surveyed the world around him. There seemed little improvement over the last two thousand years. "The far greater part of the globe is overspread with barbarism and slavery: in the civilized world, the most numerous class is condemned to ignorance and poverty...The general probability is about three to one that a new-born infant will not live to complete his fiftieth year." Gibbon's world was one with a population of less than one thousand million inhabitants. As we stand at the end of the twentieth century, only a little over two hundred years later, there are more than seven times as many humans on earth. Yet we see a world in which many millions have escaped from a daily fear of war, famine and disease. For the privileged living in parts of Europe, America and Asia, there is wealth and stability undreamt of by peoples in most past civilizations.-Alan MacFarlane, Thomas Malthus and the Making of the Modern World

Where is one that, born of woman, altogether can escapeFrom the lower world within him, moods of tiger, or of ape? Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning Age of ages,Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape?

All about him shadow still, but, while the races flower and fade,Prophet-eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on the shade, Till the peoples all are one, and all their voices blend in choricHallelujah to the Maker 'It is finish'd.

But cosmology’s hot streak has stalled. Cosmologists have looked deep into time, almost all the way back to the Big Bang itself, but they don’t know what came before it. They don’t know whether the Big Bang was the beginning, or merely one of many beginnings. Something entirely unimaginable might have preceded it. Cosmologists don’t know if the world we see around us is spatially infinite, or if there are other kinds of worlds beyond our horizon, or in other dimensions. And then the big mystery, the one that keeps the priests and the physicists up at night: no cosmologist has a clue why there is something rather than nothing.-as excerpted from herecourtesy of

Five friends I had, and two of them were snakes. Tune and Fairweather they were, thick round as a man's arm, my bedmates and playfellows, keepers of my skimped hearth and hermit's heart till in a grim pet I bade them go that day and nevermore to come again, nevermore to hiss their snakelove when they saw me drawing near or coil themselves for warmth about my shaggy legs. They went. They never came again.-Frederick Buechner, Godric

"It is hard to avoid the feeling that our current economic problems are more than just a cyclical downturn. We know that the economy has gone through some bad times. But what exactly are we experiencing?"-Tyler Cowen, as excerpted from here